How Aardman is embracing the digital age

Whereas feature films are the most visible parts of Aardman's
operation, the company -- founded by producer/director Peter Lord
and animator/cinematographer Dave Sproxton in 1976 -- is undergoing
a period of transformative growth as it adapts to the digital
revolution.

Aardman's features are being produced alongside six episodes of
Wallace & Gromit's World of Invention, a BBC1 series
that ambitiously mixes animation and live action. Meanwhile,
Aardman's intellectual-property, broadcast and digital arms are
pushing aggressively into China. The firm's digital department,
which has an annual turnover of more than £1 million has
developed a reputation for building successful online games --
Shaun the Sheep's Home Sheep Home, for example, has
notched up over 55 million plays. Last year, the firm's commercials
division produced more than 100 campaigns for brands such as
Hershey's, Nokia, Procter & Gamble and Kellogg's.

In his corner office on the first floor, Peter Lord, Aardman
cofounder and the director of Pirates!, has just stepped
off set and falls into his chair, pausing only to check the cricket
scores on his Mac. "I hope we are smart enough, as we grow, not to
spoil the things about Aardman which made us special," he says. "We
are alert to it." Lord -- who codirected the 2000 hit Chicken
Run, which had a $42 million budget and grossed over $220
million worldwide -- sees Aardman evolving into a "broad church"
built around "pleasure and pragmatism". "When we started, our niche
was stop-frame in all its forms, but on a small scale. Between us
all, we could produce perhaps 30 minutes of film a year. Now, with
far more staff [Aardman has 120 full-time staffers, with
freelancers and contractors boosting numbers to 700 at full
production], we can produce, say, 50 times that. And digital has
allowed us to do it."

Pirates! is being shot on top-of-the range Canon EOS 1D digital stills cameras -- which were also used for
the BBC Wallace & Gromit series -- rather than
Aardman's collection of "bunny-eared" Mitchell classic film
cameras, which have been retired. "We've got 40 Mitchells, which
cost us a fortune, in storage," Lord says. Digital-stills cameras
speed up the process, as do CGI effects. On Pirates! this
will be all done in-house. "In the past, the whole shooting day
depended on the rushes coming back from Technicolor, which is near
Heathrow, with a motorbike messenger," he says. "Until we'd seen
them, we daren't strike [dismantle] the set. With digital, if it
looks right [on the monitor], then it is right -- which is very
liberating."

CGI, meanwhile, has liberated Aardman in other ways, allowing it
to stretch itself creatively. "Within our specialist world, I'm a
whore! I'm shameless!" Lord says, dismissing the notion that he is
a stop-frame-animation purist. "I don't worry about theoretical
purity. I just want to hear the technician at my shoulder saying,
'I can do that' -- and you know they will. What charms me is being
able to take our handmade world and make it bigger; free it up a
bit."

The company's creative hub lies in a specially designed
animation factory ten minutes from the centre of Bristol. It houses
storyboarding, model-making, sets, CGI, editing facilities, TV,
commercials, rights and licensing, digital and production
technology. In the lobby, there's a human sized model of Morph, the
clay character who first appeared on television in 1977, next to a
cabinet containing Oscar and Bafta trophies. Scattered along the
corridors or peeping from shelves are models -- including a small
army of Wallaces and Gromits -- plus sets, props and memorabilia
from Aardman films and shows.

Over lunch in the staff canteen, departmental bosses -- Miles
Bullough (broadcast and development), Heather Wright (commercials),
Karen Heldoorn (digital) and Robin Gladman (digital content and
partnerships) -- discuss the company's strategy to monetise Aardman
properties across all platforms. "Digital is now part of our
planning right from the get-go," says Bullough, an affable forty
something whose producer credits range from the Wallace &
Gromit film A Matter of Loaf and Death to Trigger
Happy TV. "If we come up with an idea for a new TV show, for
example, we now involve everyone right at the beginning -- not just
the television guys, but the digital department, the licensing
people, the distribution people. We just try to make it as wide
ranging as possible."

A tie-in earlier this year with Procter & Gamble, in which
Shaun The Sheep character Timmy Time appeared on Fairy Non
Bio and Fairy fabric-conditioner products, shows Aardman's
transition from its tabletop origins. The multiplatform campaign,
devised by ad agency Leo Burnett, also included a TV commercial,
press ads, a viral game and a branded microsite -- all featuring
Timmy, the megastar lamb. A Matter of Loaf and Death,
which clocked 16.15 million viewers on UK television, was similarly
spun off on a range of platforms.

"The day it came off the iPlayer, where it was a runaway smash hit, it went on to
iTunes, which led to the [W&G] exhibitions business, the nPower
commercials, the [W&G] website and games," Bullough says.
Aardman's intellectual-property and licensing strategy is to
exploit rights to their properties at every turn. The company's
rights department does this for each piece of IP coming from its
broadcast arm, by gauging financial expectations and identifying
the number of platforms it can sell to. Aardman's rights division
differs from, for example, Disney's because it is nimble enough to
tailor presentations to individual clients. With the Wallace &
Gromit nPower commercials, for example, it worked with the firm's
four-time Academy Award-winning animator/director Nick Park and
creative director Merlin Crossingham. "Distributing our own
intellectual property internationally, everywhere, TV, digital, all
rights… that's what we do," says digital-content-and-partnerships
manager Gladman.

When Aardman content began popping up on YouTube -- much of it
filmed by fans with trembling handheld cameras -- the company
struck a deal with the video sharing site. It would offer pristine
copies of its work in return for a revenue stream from overlay,
preroll and other forms of ads that YouTube sells around its
programming. Now every time a dodgy copy of an Aardman film appears
on You- Tube, it is promptly removed. Although YouTube generates
limited revenue, Aardman mainly treats the channel as a marketing
tool. "We have someone in the team who is on YouTube and other fan
sites every day, posting new videos and chats," says 35-year-old
Gladman.

Negotiating the Chinese market has been challenging. To protect
its own domestic animation industry and to curtail foreign cultural
influence, China has restricted the amount of Western animation
that it allows on its TV services. But Gladman has recently
returned from Beijing, where the company sold the rights to the hit
cartoon Shaun The Sheep to state broadcaster China Central
TV (CCTV).

"We'd never done any business with our programmes in China and
it's obviously a massive new market for us, with a potential TV
audience of 1.2 billion," he says. "We first met a Chinese agency,
who handle all rights including broadcast and merchandising, at
[annual media-content marketplace] Mipcom. We then went to China
and pitched it to CCTV. They loved Shaun, and played
back-to-back episodes over a summer weekend. We had to thrash out a
deal quickly, and translate the title sequence. They liked it so
much they carried on the hourly Saturday block into September."